This fascinating
exhibition celebrates the career of acclaimed artist William
T. Wiley. William Wiley 60 Works for 60 Years particularly
investigates Wiley's prolific work as a printmaker, highlighting
60 of his prints produced throughout the last three decades.
Wiley has generated prints in all media since the 1960s,
including lithography, relief printing, intaglio, silk-screen,
woodcut and etching. The featured work was executed at
such well-known print studios as Landfall Press, Crown
Point Press, Lawrence Lithography Workshop Teaberry Press,
Shark's, Cirrus Editions, Tamarind Print Workshop, and
the Experimental Bookshop. These pieces adroitly highlight
differences in collaborative styles between an artist
and a printer in a given studio, such as might be evident
in the creative abandon Wiley experiences at the Landfall
Press, operated by Jack Lemon in Chicago, or in the formal
restrain: characterizing his work at Cirrus Editions.
William T. Wiley
Its Only A Pay Per Moon, 1974;
1996 Additions
Lithograph and Woodcut
Additions on Chamois; 43 x 42"
Published by Cirrus Edtions
& University Art Museum,
University of California-Berkeley
|
Wiley
engages multiple conceptual themes. Images of maps and
travel bespeak efforts of finding direction during processes
of personal or social transformation Wiley's frequent
depictions of human figures on stages and in other public
contexts may be read as cultural critiques, giving lie
to our public egos and attachments to intellectual or
social status, and baring Wiley's intolerance for fools
and pretension. Wiley's love of language - especially
manipulating it - manifests itself throughout his works.
Forming new combinations and puns through wordplay and
verbal mischief, Wiley allows us to see that how something
is said may change the character and meaning of a thought,
that what we think we believe may be very easily reconstructed.
William Wiley
was born in 1937, brought up in Bedford, Ind., and moved
west to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, where
he earned both the B.F.A. and M.F.A. He was a highly influential
art professor at the University of California at Davis
from 1962-73. He currently lives and works in Marin County
Calif. Wiley's work is represented in many public and
private collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art,
New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York; and the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art.
